


Martyrdom

by viktorstardust



Category: LISA (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canon Compliant, For a second, Guilt, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Amputation, Pre-Relationship, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24238648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viktorstardust/pseuds/viktorstardust
Summary: When those men cleared and they were left alone, the four of them, not a one with enough medical knowledge to know how much blood was too much, Terry had watched as Nern and Olan helped lug him to safety, an arm around Olan’s shoulder and what used to be an arm bleeding out over Nern’s. He had just stood back and watched.He figured he’d gotten in the way enough for one day.
Relationships: Brad Armstrong/Terry Hintz, can be read as platonic - Relationship
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50





	Martyrdom

They had dragged him out from the darkness of that cave, then from the blistering sun and into a hastily pitched tent, out of the way enough to keep those human predators from hearing his sounds of agony.

Even though Brad barely made a sound at all.

When those men cleared and they were left alone, the four of them, not a one with enough medical knowledge to know how much blood was too much, Terry had watched as Nern and Olan helped lug him to safety, an arm around Olan’s shoulder and what used to be an arm bleeding out over Nern’s. He had just stood back and watched. 

He figured he’d gotten in the way enough for one day.

He felt guilty. Guilty to have even set foot in Brad’s life, make his home there in another person. All because he couldn’t keep living inside himself. 

So selfish.

He followed the three of them like he was a stranger, eyes focused on the bloody trail in the dirt and dust. How much blood should he have been worried about? It was like he was painting a red line right over the wasteland. Like he was splitting it in half. Terry felt so sick. 

Felt like he shouldn’t be near Brad right now, as if he was in trouble for having a knife held to his throat while that maniac ranted about some lesson Brad was supposed to have learned. He considered whether or not he was the right choice and felt even sicker.

They pitched a tent and Terry sat outside with his hands fumbling in his lap, devoid of anything else to do. There was no sound coming from the tent and he considered that Brad had died. Wordlessly slipped away from blood loss in the desert, how so many men before him slipped away these days. It hadn’t been the case, Olan was still poking his head out to ask Nern to clean off bloody rags made from torn-up old ponchos and shawls. And Brad was tougher than that.

They were all tougher than that, except for Terry. Terry could see himself dying from a paper cut. 

He drew circles in the dirt with his finger as time passed slower than it ever had in this urgent, desperate time. His diary was nearby, but he had no more pencils and he didn’t think he had much to write anyway. It would just be nonsense written from the fear and the guilt that continued washing over him, wave after painful wave whenever he was reminded of that knife to his neck, the way three of them held his arms and exposed his throat for easier slicing, Brad’s screams and the tearing of flesh. 

There was nothing to write about. Nothing helpful, anyway. 

Terry curled in on himself and just listened. For anything, a word spoken by Brad or even a cough or the faint rustling of someone moving around in there. How unfortunate for him that the two quietest men in the group were in the tent, and the one that talked the most was going back and forth between them and a nearby river, with nothing to say while he was back. Terry needed to hear someone say something optimistic. He was for once in his life, without an uplifting word to say.

After a while, Olan partially emerged from the tent, blood caked on his hand. Terry looked at him expectantly.

“We’re gonna have to stitch him shut,” He spoke grimly. Terry could see that he was only half out because he was still holding a rag to Brad’s arm. His stomach lurched. “I need someone to go find a town and see if anyone’s selling first aid.” 

Terry bit his lip and spoke from instinct. He needed to get inside. “Why don’t you and Nern go?” No reason, just a lazy excuse to be alone with the source of his current shame. Scary as it was, they needed to talk. Even if Brad was out cold, they needed to talk. “I-I wouldn’t know where to look.” 

He expected more resistance, but instead he got a nod beckoning him inside. “Alright. Need you to keep putting pressure on the wound.” 

Terry followed him inside. It was dark, but he could still see everything he was afraid to see. 

Brad was pale. Paler than he’d seen any living man that had to walk every day under the oppressive sun. He was shiny with sweat and his good eye was distant. But Brad’s eyes were always distant.

Olan guided Terry’s hand to the wound so it wouldn’t be without pressure, showing him how hard to press the rag down onto the stump. It felt unreal, he felt miles away from it all but the hurt was still so raw and deep. The outsider looking in with all the pain of the insider.

“We’ll be back soon.” He watched Olan turn to leave and out of a desperate need to hear some needed reassurance, he called after him.

“How’d you get so good at this?”

Olan shrugged and smiled, appreciating the recognition. “When you’ve got kids, you wanna be prepared for the worst.”

Terry stared at him for a moment of sobriety. People all around him carried on knowledge from their lives before the world ended that kept them alive. Prepared for the worst, as it were. All Terry brought from the past was the ability to be unseen. To keep the target off his back. He must’ve lost that ability somewhere down the line.

“Keep pressure on that wound.” He felt a reassuring pat on his back as Olan left and he thanked God he was readable enough for the other guys to realize some things needed to be said that were just between the two of them.

Now, if only Terry could find out what that was.

If Brad was aware of who was next to him in that tent, he didn’t show a sign of it. His head was lolled over his own shoulder and his eyes cast down to his lap. Other than the sweat and the anemic color of his skin, he looked fine, almost unfazed by the reality of their situation. Terry should’ve figured that much. Brad was tough. He wouldn’t be clinging to him to have his wounds nursed back to health. To imagine that he’d be anything but himself was a childish fantasy. 

Terry’s voice failed him. Every time he thought he’d open his own mouth to say something, he realized over and over that he didn’t know what to say. Maybe a normal man, a man with some kind of dignity would say some curt little ‘thank you’ for his life being spared and that’d be the end of that. But Terry’s heart was filled with fear and questions and the sinking feeling that he should not be alive. He knew that feeling, he’d felt it before. He had shoved his way into Brad’s life despite the other man’s hesitation. If Terry died, that was on Terry. Nobody else. Why didn’t he just die? 

What ended up finally leaving his lips was stupid. So stupid and not what he wanted to say at all. “Hey, dude...How are you feeling?”

He must’ve been born stupid. If Brad had preferred his arm, he would’ve died stupid.

Asking a man that lost half his weight in blood how he was feeling. 

“Fine.”

It’s exactly what he expected him to say. Ever the martyr, Brad Armstrong.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Blind reassurance was the next best thing to actually having a conversation with him. Terry even cracked a disingenuous smile to sell it. Not that Brad was looking. “Okay?”

There was no answer. They were left in silence again.

He was used to silences with Brad. When it was just them by a fire waiting for the other to fall asleep and rest off their injuries so they could continue on. He knew so little about Brad despite being by his side longer than any of their little group. What little he did know of Brad, he wanted to be around it for his entire life. 

His life that had almost just been snuffed out like it was never even there at all.

He hated this. He hated every moment of this. He missed a time when he didn’t consider himself such a liability. Where he was Brad’s sidekick but was no less important to his friend’s goal than anyone else. 

Now all Terry was, was a stump where an arm used to be, a living liability with nothing to offer in exchange for the cost of keeping him alive. This had grown to define him in only mere minutes. Stripped of that almighty persona he put in place just to protect his own, weak sense of self-respect from exactly this. The “lord of hints” was a fallacy. 

A damn joke.

“Why?” He spoke and realized his throat hurt like it was his own body’s way of telling him he’d said enough already.

Brad finally looked at him, just out of the corner of his eye but it was still something. “...‘Why’?” 

He had to say it. Something about ripping off a bandaid quickly so it wouldn’t hurt. 

“Why did you do that?”

Even if Brad knew more about Terry than Terry would ever know about Brad, somehow they were really good at understanding what the other meant, no matter how vague.

Brad spoke just as calm and measured as he did when he wasn’t bleeding out into a rag. “Didn’t have much of a choice.” 

Terry felt almost insulted that it was that simple of a choice for him. It was insulting that he was the only person out here who didn’t see that the trade-off was more complicated than that.

“You did,” Terry was hoarse and felt like he was just as pale and sick looking as Brad. “You did have a choice.”

Brad said nothing and Terry rambled on in his place.

“Like, it’d be different if it was one of the others,” he spoke, his voice was shaken and his words went by fast like he’d been waiting to say them his whole life. “Y’know? Like, at least Nern has a gun. I don’t even know how to fire a gun.” He chuckled sadly. Brad was looking at him fully in the eyes now, and Terry wanted to tell him to stop because he didn’t even feel worth a simple turn of the head. “I mean, what the hell do I do, I can barely get a punch in before you guys finish the job, and I thought that it was fine until you lost an arm over it-“

“Terry...” 

“-and I’m the cheerleader and stuff maybe, y’know, but it’s not like you guys can’t live without it-“

“Terry.”

“-do you know how much harder it’s gonna be without a whole arm?”

“ _ Terry _ .”

He finally stopped, feeling so small all of a sudden. Small and squishable like a roach on the bathroom floor. His eyes were so wet he couldn’t even see what Brad’s face looked like.

“I wasn’t going to let them kill you.”

It didn’t make sense. It would never make sense. The words sounded so simple. He’d gone from feeling offended that nobody saw what he saw to feeling stupid for the same reason. Why was he doomed to be behind everyone else, in every walk of life? 

Terry didn’t belong out here.

He looked down to his lap and curled in on himself like he always did, still dutifully putting pressure on Brad’s wound. He supposed Brad could put pressure on it himself, but not one of them would be callous enough to make him. 

“Fuck,” he sniffed and rubbed at his eyes to keep himself from crying. The last thing they needed was for him to start with the waterworks. “I’m sorry.”

Brad didn’t know quite how to comfort him. Terry didn’t blame him for it. 

He remembered being in the hospital as a kid. Ending up in the hospital over and over again until it started to become just a countdown, a betting pool as to when that poor little kid who lived in a hospital bed would finally just go back to God. It had been all but expected of him. The plan was for him to die at thirteen. Then at fourteen, and one more time at fifteen before he started getting color back in his skin and hair back on his head and he had to learn the hard way that when everyone expected you to die, no one was really planning for your future. 

Somehow the future felt just as bad. Were the other guys also wondering when this poor sucker would finally bite it and go back to God like he should have done all those years back?

Brad might not live without his arm. He could definitely live without Terry.

“Who are we looking for?” An irrelevant question escaped his lips. Maybe it wasn’t so irrelevant, though. If the answer was what he thought it was, death was almost imminent. For all of them.

They didn’t look at each other. They waited in silence for a very long time before Brad told him what he already knew.

“The girl.”

“Friend of yours?” Terry said with a halfhearted, sad smile.

“My daughter.”

Huh. At least it was more noble a reason than everyone else out here. 

Together they leaned against the canvas wall of the tent, both exhausted in their own right. What a miserable pair. 

Terry didn’t feel much better, but it hardly mattered anymore. Brad didn’t see himself as making the wrong choice, Terry couldn’t shake the fact that at least Brad’s arm had a function. A reason to be there.

With his delusions ripped from him, Terry was forced to remember how fundamentally sad he was inside. But that, too, didn’t matter. Brad saved him once, Brad saved him again. And as long Brad was going to continue saving him, Terry would be at his side. It’s all he wants to do.

“Hey,” he looked at Brad who didn’t look back at him. That was okay. “Thanks, Brad. You’re...you’re a really good friend.”

In response, Brad leaned over to his side and threw up.

“Oh, god,” Terry grabbed him and helped him into a better sitting position and tried sloppily to multitask holding his wound and fumbling for the least bloody of the bloody rags around him, hurriedly wiping Brad’s mouth away. “Geez, I didn’t think it was  _ that  _ cheesy.” He joked nervously. 

Brad shook his head and let it loll back over to look at Terry, looking even worse than he did before. His pupils were dilated and everything about him was slow and far away. His body shook so bad beneath his touch.

There was a thing he knew from bitter experience — drug withdrawals. Could’ve also been blood loss, but he couldn’t imagine the pain was too good on his joy-free mind. But Brad was a fighter. Terry couldn’t let himself be too worried. He wiped the sweat from Brad’s forehead.

“Hang in there, man.” He wiped the spittle and bile from Brad’s lips and watched as his eyes rolled back and closed, falling into a well-deserved, feverish sleep. Terry looked on helplessly with sad understanding. 

Maybe this was why he belonged at Brad’s side. To be next to him for these things. Brad didn’t need him as much as Terry needed Brad, but he could almost pretend that this moral support was worth an arm. 

It wasn’t, but Terry was nothing if not blindly optimistic. 

With a sad smile, he held Brad’s face in his hand and gingerly, sweetly, touched their foreheads together and waited for Olan and Nern to get back. 

If companionship was all he could offer him, he’d offer it to him more than anyone else ever had before.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry if the rating was too light, wasn't quite sure for this one. 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading. If you enjoyed, please don't be afraid to leave a comment letting me know.


End file.
